3 ms·

I had knoppix running at the time. It was my first experience of a Live CD. which was cool as I could run it I'm sure it was a pentium 100 with 16meg and 800MB

by jaffa2 3mo ago

I had knoppix running at the time. It was my first experience of a Live CD. which was cool as I could run it I'm sure it was a pentium 100 with 16meg and 800MB hdd. or maybe it was later on my Pentium II with 128Meg and 6.4GB Fireball! Either way I used it a good few times to rescue data and generally fiddle with all sort of pcs from this era. (late 90's to early 2000')

TacticalCoder 3mo ago
Same. Back then we weren't booting off USB memory sticks: CDs it was. Knoppix and memtest to troubleshoot friends and family's PCs were my go-to tools. Always had a few bootable CD roms in the car. Heck I'd even take a HDD with me and wouldn't hesitate to open other people's PC and hook my "rescue HDD". Worst memory ever troubleshooting a friend's PC was in the 386 or 486 days (didn't have Knoppix yet but was already on Slackware): he asked me to backup his files and I hooked one of my HDD as the main (as it was booting fine) and hooked my friend's HDD as a "slave" (that's how the terminology was back then). But I got sloppy and just let my friend's HDD sitting on the tower. Metallic PC tower. I turned the computer on, we heard an horrible noise and we saw a puff of smoke. Old HDDs were kinda wild from that standpoint: much more exposed conductive parts than the later ones. I just managed to short-circuit his HDD and it, nearly literally, went up in smoke. I was feeling really bad and gave him a HDD of mine. Oh well at least he had a working computer (but zero files of his).
- mc32 3mo ago
  The usual solution to bad controller boards was finding the same model drive and swapping boards at least temporarily to get data off.
  - mikestorrent 3mo ago
    This worked for me, once. Putting drives in the freezer has worked 3x. I miss that... when an SSD dies it's just dead
  - jaffa2 3mo ago
    I tried this with 2 drives in my life. 0/2 success rate.

by jaffa2 3mo ago

TacticalCoder 3mo ago

Same. Back then we weren't booting off USB memory sticks: CDs it was. Knoppix and memtest to troubleshoot friends and family's PCs were my go-to tools. Always had a few bootable CD roms in the car. Heck I'd even take a HDD with me and wouldn't hesitate to open other people's PC and hook my "rescue HDD". Worst memory ever troubleshooting a friend's PC was in the 386 or 486 days (didn't have Knoppix yet but was already on Slackware): he asked me to backup his files and I hooked one of my HDD as the main (as it was booting fine) and hooked my friend's HDD as a "slave" (that's how the terminology was back then). But I got sloppy and just let my friend's HDD sitting on the tower. Metallic PC tower. I turned the computer on, we heard an horrible noise and we saw a puff of smoke. Old HDDs were kinda wild from that standpoint: much more exposed conductive parts than the later ones. I just managed to short-circuit his HDD and it, nearly literally, went up in smoke. I was feeling really bad and gave him a HDD of mine. Oh well at least he had a working computer (but zero files of his).

mc32 3mo ago
The usual solution to bad controller boards was finding the same model drive and swapping boards at least temporarily to get data off.
- mikestorrent 3mo ago
  This worked for me, once. Putting drives in the freezer has worked 3x. I miss that... when an SSD dies it's just dead
- jaffa2 3mo ago
  I tried this with 2 drives in my life. 0/2 success rate.